Grading!

“Did you grade our tests yet?” I think I decipher my class fellows saying the phrase at least ten times a day; followed by an animadversion or appraise. “What did you get?” “Aha! I got a higher grade than you” and so on. A few days ago, while taking notes in my Government AP class I zoned out into a maelstrom of thoughts regarding the origin and system of “grades”.

My curious mind summarily led me to Wikipedia, aka the devious little machine serving as an incendiary to a teacher’s abhorrence towards a student’s ease, where I came across some interesting articles regarding the whole system of ‘grading’. Although it began in China to distinguish and pick out the best of the people for running bureaucracy, I still hunted for some more information and therefore began to think about the “why’ of the situation. Why are we graded? Why is it that a certain number determines our mental capacity and where we will end up? Why are we to dedicate huge number of hours to something that we are not even sure will help in ‘life’? And to figure out the why, I surveyed some people including the brains of our class and some successful people, or so as the world perceives them.

I accost certain ‘intelligent’ people who thought grades determine the level of our intelligence and claimed I have a myopic brain since I thought otherwise. “Well yeah, if you get an F on your math test, which by the way everyone got an A on, you are dumb! How can you not understand math?” My friend stated in an overt and pejorative tone. This is like expecting a fish to climb a tree as well as a monkey and humiliating it if not accomplished. If we are living on this vision, we might as well expect the whole world to believe in one thing and regard anything otherwise as sacrilege.

This brackish mentality was disproven when I asked the similar question from some successful people who are content and halcyon with their life and found that their success is not a talisman or because of getting 100’s in all their classes, but because they were greedy for knowledge. They found the positive in negative prospects. They created something out of every bit of knowledge they learned, something useful. Although their goals undulated at times, they never stopped dreaming and sought suppliantly for knowledge, even from their juniors.

My trail of thoughts also led me to the whole concept of standardized testing. Fine, I admit, I was studying for the ever so dreaded SAT test and so my conclusion is probably prejudiced because I absolutely loathe opening that preparation book but my point of view is that the whole concept of “standardized testing” is just wrong. From gambit of our educational lives we are taught to be original, to be different, to create ourselves, to find ourselves and so our mind starts functioning like that. But as soon as we reach high school a race begins. Who’s better than whom? Who has higher grades? Who has a better GPA? Who got a 2300 on their SAT? Who is going to an Ivy League? We are tested, not on our originality, but a generalized and common assumption.

For example, you give a piece of paper and a pen to two people; one uses the ink to create a beautiful story on the very paper while the other makes a paper plane and uses the pencil to enhance it’s celerity. By the whole system of grading you are saying that the person who created that paper plane is stupid because he wasted paper by not writing something on it, your definition of intelligence. But I see this situation as difference of perspectives. Our brains are different. We define things differently. We view things differently. Then why is it that we are compared and ‘graded’ based on what your mind thinks should be correct?

This may seem like a histrionic rant of a desperate student avid for straight A’s, or maybe of a human being yearning for some change in the propriety of our system; but then again your brain is different than mine and you have every right to your thought.